Avaya Helps Partners Use Social Media For Business

It's been a relevant question for solution providers ever since Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn became part of the cultural lexicon: How best to embrace social networking for business use?

The debate rages but in the past two years several vendors have piloted social networking-flavored programs for their channel partners, hoping to help them effectively navigate the platforms and experiment with how to drive business outcomes.

Avaya is one of the more recent vendors to take up the mantle. Earlier this spring it launched Social Media Blitz, a program designed to help Avaya partners onboard themselves with social media and leverage social networking communications on their own.

When a partner signs up, he or she is given a login and access to the Avaya Social Port, an aggregator dashboard that allows the partner to access a library of Avaya-flavored content, select a social media platform (either Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn) and push the content out using those platforms. Partners can adjust the content depending on the audience they're trying to reach or the message they're trying to promote.

The Social Port also offers a library of small and medium enterprise (SME) content, an archive of training sessions that teach the partner how to use the Social Port and understand some social media basics, and receive training and education materials via Avaya's Social Media Blitz Resource portal.

"This is for the partners that don't have the bandwidth or time to put a formal social media practice together," said Piper Hyman, senior marketing manager, SME, for Avaya. "What we've heard from partners in the past is that they don't have the content and they don't have the resources."

The program will be free for Avaya partners until June. After that, it will be folded into Avaya MarketLeaders, the vendor's online marketing resource portal. Market Leaders is a paid program, but partners can use Avaya's co-op marketing funds to join it and they'll able to use their own Social Port aggregator for a small hosting fee paid to Avaya.

The program was piloted for SME-facing Avaya solution providers but is now available for all U.S.-based Avaya partners, as well as in EMEA, Canada and several Caribbean markets.

Of the hundreds of Avaya partners Hyman's team polled, about 50 percent weren't using social media for business at all, she said, and many weren't using it personally, either. That meant taking a fundamental approach to building the Social Port, which went live on March 23.

Hyman and Patti Moran, worldwide director of channels marketing, said that rather than merely do partners' social media for them using a template, it was more important to teach them "to fish" -- that is, get comfortable enough with regular social media use for business that they were comfortable building on the Avaya tools provided.

"It's not Avaya telling them what to do, it's incorporating social media into their business," said Moran.

NEXT: What To Put On Social Media Platforms

The program had more than 300 participating partners as of mid-May, more than three-quarters of them based in the U.S. The biggest hindrance to broader social media adoption, partners have told Avaya, is what to put on the platforms.

"Content is the big thing," Moran said. "Many businesses that think they're good with social media are very spotty with content. It's an investment in time."

The other issue, said Hyman, is skepticism. At one of the initial sessions to build interest in the program, Hyman said she had more than one partner ask her, "Why bother?" It's a matter of presence, she said -- social media is too ubiquitous and too pervasive to ignore.

"If your competitor has a Facebook page, [he or she] has ways to connect that you don't," Hyman said.

MVD Communications, Cincinnati, is among the Avaya partners participating in the program. Iris Johnson, marketing manager, said that like most solution providers, she was self-taught with social media.

"I was just trying my luck with it," she said. "We had a Facebook page before, but I learned a lot more about it and how to deal with it and make it better."

Johnson said MVD is measuring progress with its social media platforms by the number of followers, "likes" and re-tweets it receives, as well as whether their use generates any inbound business leads. She'd like to see Avaya expand the program to other platforms, as well, such as YouTube.

It's still too soon to tell whether it's really working, Johnson said, in part because the definition of "working," in the case of social media, is slippery.

"It's like search engine optimization," she said. "What I've been told is that it takes six to nine months before you see results. Right now we're looking at the number of followers, and that has increased in all of our channels."

Is MVD getting business leads as a result of its social networking?

"No, not yet," Johnson said. "But we have a presence and we have another way to say learn about us."